Glynis Johns, a Tony Award-winning stage and screen star who played the mother opposite Julie Andrews in the classic movie Mary Poppins and introduced the world to the bittersweet standard-to-be "Send in the Clowns" by Stephen Sondheim, has died. She was 100, the AP reports. Mitch Clem, her manager, said she died Thursday at an assisted living home in Los Angeles of natural causes. "Today's a sad day for Hollywood," Clem said. "She is the last of the last of old Hollywood." Johns was the fourth generation of an English theatrical family. Her father, Mervyn Johns, had a long career as a character actor and her mother was a pianist. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, because her parents were visiting the area on tour at the time of her birth. She was a dancer at 12 and an actor at 14 in London's West End.
Johns' greatest triumph was playing Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, for which she won a Tony in 1973. Sondheim wrote the show's hit song "Send in the Clowns" to suit her distinctive husky voice, but she lost the part in the 1977 film version to Elizabeth Taylor. "I've had other songs written for me, but nothing like that," Johns told the AP in 1990. "It's the greatest gift I've ever been given in the theater." Other highlights include playing the mother in Mary Poppins, the movie that introduced Julie Andrews and where she sang the rousing tune "Sister Suffragette." She also starred in the 1989 Broadway revival of The Circle, W. Somerset Maugham's romantic comedy about love, marriage and fidelity, opposite Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger. In 1963, she starred in her own TV sitcom, Glynis.
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